Wait a tick, does this mean we can tweak the voltage to our GPU's through bios?

Through the motherboard's BIOS? No.

The only thing this will change is where you plug in supplemental power.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigjdubb

What's the big deal about plugging PCI-E cables into a motherboard? We already plug the PCI-E cables into a pcb (the GPU's pcb) without worrying about things catching on fire or melting traces, I'm not sure what the logic is behind the fear/skepticism.

Why not, I can control every other voltage that's run through the motherboard via bios.

Granted, the GPU would need to be "unlocked" but most every GPU is, just need to do a Mobo bios update for new GPU's.

You could possibly tweak the power delivery to the slot itself but I think the video cards bios would control voltage distribution on the graphics card like it is now. What you are suggesting would be akin to tweaking your CPU's voltage with from your power supply.

You could possibly tweak the power delivery to the slot itself but I think the video cards bios would control voltage distribution on the graphics card like it is now. What you are suggesting would be akin to tweaking your CPU's voltage with from your power supply.

In my mind im picturing something similar to how modded bios on a maxwell card works, you can set the voltage to whatever you want, but the hard cap on say a maxwell Titan-X is 1.274 volts, so even if your bios mod said 1.4 volts, your card won't care and still only allow the 1.274 volts through.

Just seems like it would allow GPU manufacturers to be lazy, and not have to design custom bios, and just allow the hard cap to prevent damaging voltages and leave it up to the motherboard folks to hash out the details.

Modern GPU's seem to have all the built in fail safes as modern CPU's do with throttling and such, so why not just let the motherboard folks deal with all that stuff?

I hear what you are saying though, I suppose I just see it being similar to overclocking your RAM I suppose.

Do you have any idea the power levels "LN2" motherboards can already throw around? EPS 4-pin is literally 4 lines of 12v and the spec says they need to be capable of carrying 20 amps. That's 240w in a single 4-pin. An 8-pin adds another 50% for 360w. Some better boards have 8+4 or even 8+8 for 600w or 720w. And it isn't for show either. A well OC'd on water PD chip is capable of nearly maxing out a single EPS 8-pin.

I know CPU's can pull that much but adding that plus the GPU means the motherboards will be pulling all the power so again if there's a watercooling leak / hardware fault that'll be full PSU power through the motherboard, can be dangerous not to mention a bigger bang when something goes wrong.

Like I said it'd be great if they could do it but if a fault happens or whatever they need to make damn sure they can dissipate that power quickly because if the caps store it and you go to work on it and you have no clue (like most) how to short the motherboard or power supply... well nuff said really.